Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  More shit in the Middle East. Always.

  After a while he forgot about watching for a woman entering the lobby and going straight to the stairs or elevators.

  After a while, he pretty much forgot about Justice.

  The guest in the raincoat had decided on traveling under the name Justice because it seemed apropos, though “Vengeance” might have done as well.

  He laid the half-packed suitcase on one side of the queen-sized bed, then removed his coat and his sport jacket and stretched out on his back on the other side.

  But he couldn’t relax.

  Suddenly unable to lie still, he sat up on the edge of the mattress and reached for the phone directories in the nightstand drawer. It took him only a few minutes to find what he was looking for in the Queens directory. Davison’s Dent and Paint, an auto body shop on Filmont Avenue.

  He sat with the directory spread open on his lap, staring at the phone number. He could call the repair shop now and probably talk to Elvis Davison, who owned and operated the dent removal and paint business. Who a year ago had sexually molested and murdered Justice’s four-year-old son, Will. Davison, who, acquitted despite overwhelming evidence, had walked smiling from the courtroom. Who’d returned to his family and business and life as usual after an unpleasant but brief interval, while Justice and his wife April walked from the courtroom into hell.

  Elvis Davison, who was right now, since it wasn’t quite closing time, probably concerned mostly with pounding out dents and matching paint colors. Davison, the child molester and murderer, free because the police had searched his apartment with a faulty warrant.

  Davison, who had killed what was bright and pure in a dismal, cruel world.

  Davison, the man Justice was here to kill.

  After the trial, Justice and April had thought the tragedy might somehow make them closer. Couples who shared grief at least shared something. Perhaps they might lessen each other’s burden of pain.

  They’d instead discovered that grief was a thing you could almost reach out and touch and feel grow, if it weren’t for your terror. Even though two people rather than one desperately wanted it to leave, it didn’t go away any sooner. Instead it loomed larger, feeding off the agony of two rather than one. It did drive Justice closer to April. It drove April further and further away.

  Justice’s wife, the murdered Will’s mother, lived now more on antidepressants than food. When she wasn’t taking pills, she drank. When she wasn’t drinking, she was downing pills. Two psychologists and a psychiatrist had been unable to make her grief bearable. Unable to sleep, she roamed the house at night, and she roamed Justice’s dreams.

  He slid the phone closer to him and punched out the code for an outside line. Then he called, but not the number of Davison’s Dent and Paint. He called his home.

  April picked up on the third ring and said hello. He could tell from the slow slide of her voice that she was heavily medicated.

  At first he said nothing, then simply, “It’s me.”

  “Why aren’t you home?” She sounded disinterested, everything obscured by her fog of medication.

  “I told you I had a business trip. I’m in Cincinnati.”

  “Cinciwhat?”

  “—Nati. In Ohio.”

  “That’s right, a business trip. I forgot.”

  “You okay?”

  “What’s okay? Who the hell’s okay?”

  “April, have you had supper?”

  “Not suppertime,” she slurred.

  She was right, he realized. He was an hour ahead of her in New York. She was in their apartment in St. Louis.

  “I’ll eat somethin’ later,” she said, obviously not meaning it. She’d have a drink later, or take a pill. Or take too many pills, as she had more than once.

  He thought of telling her where he really was, what he was going to do. She would approve, he was sure. At least she wouldn’t disapprove. She was beyond caring, beyond hoping. He wasn’t. Not quite yet. She could pull out of her pain and grief, as he could. Someday. Possibly. It might help them to know that Davison was dead, that he’d paid for what he’d done to their child.

  But would she recover from her grief without Justice—her husband?

  “You still there?” she asked.

  “Always,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. He could hear her breathing into the receiver, maybe sobbing. He wanted to be there to comfort her. Should be there.

  “April?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Promise me something.”

  “Why not?”

  “Make yourself a pizza for supper. We’ve still got some in the freezer. Put one in the microwave. Will you do that? Eat something instead of…Will you put in a pizza?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Yeah.

  “Whatever we do,” she said, “we can’t bring back Will. It won’t unhappen.”

  Why did she say that? Can she somehow know where I am? What I’m intending to do?

  Her voice, heavy with medication, came over the phone. “Like the prosecutor said, there’s no way to unring a—”

  “I know what he said!” Justice interrupted.

  “The bastard was right.”

  “The bastard was,” he said after a while.

  “I’ll put in the pizza,” she said, and hung up.

  Justice replaced the receiver, stood, and went to the dresser, where he’d placed the package he’d picked up at the desk. He peeled off the brown wrapping paper, opened the box inside, and from wadded newspaper used as packing material he withdrew a .45 caliber revolver. It had belonged to his father, who’d been an avid hunter, and who had bought the gun at a hardware store in Iowa, before permits were required and firearm sales recorded. Justice didn’t hunt. After his father’s funeral six years ago, he’d left the shotguns and rifles to be disposed of by the estate, and for some reason had kept the revolver.

  Now it seemed like fate, helping him to make up his mind to come here and kill Davison, so he’d mailed the gun, loaded, ahead to the hotel, telling the postal clerk it was a book, hoping it would make it through security. It had. Now it was in Justice’s right hand. Now he could point it at Davison and squeeze the trigger.

  Now it didn’t seem so much like fate that he should be here. The simple fact was, while he might not care what happened to him after shooting Davison, he still very much cared what happened to April.

  And he knew what would happen to her.

  He placed the gun back in the box and stuffed the newspaper around it before closing it and using what was left of the brown paper to rewrap it. Then he put his raincoat back on.

  Outside the hotel, he found a trash receptacle and dropped the box into it. Since rain was falling heavier, the sidewalks were less crowded than when he’d arrived, and he was sure no one had seen him. And even if they had, he was simply a man disposing of some trash, perhaps the small box that had contained a gift he’d received, or simply something he’d purchased down the street and that was now in his pocket.

  Feeling a relief that surprised him, he saw that his hand, that had so recently held the gun and was now wet from the rain, was trembling. He crossed the street to a diner and had a tuna melt and french fries for supper.

  The next day, he checked out of the hotel and returned home to St. Louis to watch his wife continue her ever deepening spiral into depression.

  6

  The present, New York

  Bev Baker was forty-eight but looked thirty-eight. She stood nude before the steam-fogged full-length mirror in the bathroom and watched the exhaust fan clear the reflecting glass to reveal a woman still wet from her shower. Her breasts were lower than a girl’s but still full, and what Lenny Rodman, in that way of his, had just called bouncily bountiful. Her long legs were still curvaceous, her hips and thighs slim, her abdominal muscles taut from daily workouts. Her auburn hair was wet and tousled. Her smile was wicked.

  Aging nicely and not a bad package, she decided, and one Lenny certa
inly appreciated, which is what made her appreciate Lenny.

  Lenny was in the bedroom on the other side of the door. Bev figured he was still lying back in bed, smoking a cigarette, even though it was a no-smoking room. Lenny didn’t like obeying rules, which was part of what had led him to the midtown Manhattan hotel room for sex in the afternoon with Bev. The other part was Bev.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d enjoyed an afternoon assignation. Three months ago Lenny, thirtyish and handsome as a soap actor, had come into Light and Shade Lamp and Fixture Emporium and asked to see the buyer, who was Bev, who was also head of the sales department. She’d had an argument with her husband, Floyd, that morning, and was still smarting from some of the insults he’d sent her way. In retrospect, she knew that was what had made her vulnerable to Lenny, who could spot a broken wing like a hawk.

  Floyd was almost fifteen years older than she was, and his increasing absence from home and her bed, his constant whining about his heart condition, were symptoms of what Bev knew was a failing marriage. It was why she insisted on continuing working, though Floyd was retired now, with a decent pension and Social Security, and they could get by comfortably if she stayed home. But Bev didn’t want to stay home, cooped up in a one-bedroom New York apartment—not with Floyd. They both understood that was the reason she continued to work. Floyd had become disinterested except for when he wanted to be verbally abusive. But he wasn’t dumb. He knew as well as she did that their marriage was headed for a train wreck.

  Bev could be insulted only so much, and ignored only so long. What happened with Lenny seemed so natural, she wasn’t sure if he’d seduced her or vice versa. She’d listened carefully to what he had to sell that day, in her office right off the display floor. He was handsome in a smooth way, with lazy eyes and an easy smile, and full of bullshit from the get-go. It seemed he’d made a deal to purchase hundreds of obsolete fire extinguishers, which he’d had made into “novelty lamps.” He was now trying to market them discount because of increasing demand and decreasing storage space, due to a rental dispute.

  Bev could be a charmer herself. Never bullshit a bullshitter, she told Lenny, but in a nice way, not using those exact terms. He got the message, and with his sexy grin admitted he was stuck with a warehouse full of fire extinguisher lamps and needed to sell them cheap or he’d have to give them away.

  “Have you always been in the lamp business?” Bev asked.

  He settled back in his chair and crossed his legs real cool-like, the drape of his gray slacks saying they were well tailored. Lenny knew how to dress the part. Something Bev liked in a man. Some of the stuff Floyd had been wearing lately looked like it came from a retirement home fire sale. And if she told him about it…well, never mind.

  “Before this I was in the coffee table business,” Lenny said. “I made this deal with a cemetery near the Hudson that was being moved. They weren’t going to reuse the damaged marble slabs that rested on top of the coffins.”

  “Why on top?” Bev asked.

  “That’s to keep the coffins from rising to the surface when the water table gets higher during the wet seasons. Good, beautifully veined marble. So I bought them, ground and polished them, and put some fancy legs on them for coffee tables.”

  “How’d they sell?”

  Lenny smiled. “What would look good on them would be those fire extinguisher lamps.”

  “The ones I’m going to buy?”

  “You serious?”

  She glanced at her watch. “You want to go to lunch, we’ll talk price.”

  His hooded gaze traveled over her body, lingering on her breasts. She was sitting behind her desk, and she knew he was wondering what her legs were like. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Legs, I got.

  “I’m picking up the check,” she said. “Company business.”

  “Then I can’t say no.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said.

  That fateful lunch had been three months ago. The fire extinguisher lamps still sat in the showroom, unsold. If anyone else had been head of sales, they would have been priced down and out or junked.

  “You die in there?” Lenny called, from the other side of the bathroom door.

  “No, out there, with you.”

  Bev didn’t bother with a towel as she opened the door and went into the bedroom to let Lenny see what she’d been looking at in the mirror. She got the result she expected.

  “C’mon back to bed with me,” Lenny said, snuffing out his cigarette in a room service glass he was using as an ashtray.

  “It’s almost two o’clock, Lenny. I’ve gotta get back to work.” Bev moved toward where her clothes were folded on the chair near the bed. Too near. His hand closed gently but firmly around her wrist. She pretended to struggle but didn’t really pull away. “I just took a shower, Lenny.”

  “You took one, you can take another in no time. You’re already undressed for one.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think a shower’s what you have in mind.”

  He pulled her toward the bed. “Mind reader, you.”

  At twenty after three they left the hotel together. It was one of the big chain hotels, the lobby was crowded, and it was midday in Midtown. No one paid much attention to them.

  Out on the sidewalk, after the dim room with its closed drapes, it seemed unusually bright and sunny. While the doorman was standing with one foot on the curb and the other in the street, trying to hail a cab, Lenny kissed Bev on the cheek. “Gonna ride back to work?”

  “No. It’s a nice day. I’ll walk.” A cab veered toward the curb and the doorman stepped out of the way, then opened a back door.

  “I thought you were late.”

  “I am. I’m also sales manager.”

  Lenny grinned as he lowered himself into the cab, simultaneously tipping the doorman. “Must be nice being boss,” he said.

  “It sure is some days, around noon.”

  She watched the cab pull out into heavy Midtown traffic. Lenny lifted a hand, so a wave went with his grin.

  Bev began striding along Fifty-first Street, a tall, attractive woman, well dressed but with her hair, fluffy from the hotel drier, mussed by the breeze as soon as she crossed the intersection. She drew appreciative stares, even a honking horn that might have been for her. She might be married to Floyd, but she wasn’t a fossil like Floyd. Not yet by a long shot.

  Halfway back to Light and Shade, she got the feeling she’d been getting too often lately. It was a prickly uneasiness, like a slight pressure on the back of her neck, and sometimes when she turned around it was as if there might have been someone there if she’d only turned faster. Once, when Floyd was out of town with his golf buddies, and she’d come home from work exhausted and kicked off her high heels and fallen into a leather armchair, she could have sworn the cushion was still warm, as if somebody had been sitting there and left only minutes before she arrived. It was creepy, and she had an idea what it might be.

  Floyd suspected something and had hired someone to investigate her. A detective.

  Bev almost grinned at the thought. If Floyd wanted a divorce, he could have one. They had an iron-clad pre-nup, so there was no logical reason he should hire a detective other than to satisfy his curiosity. No monetary reason, anyway.

  Of course, there were other reasons and other kinds of satisfaction. Floyd didn’t get it up very often these days, but he still had an active mind.

  Hell with it.

  Bev crossed the intersection against the light, taking her time even though traffic up the block was bearing down on her. If anyone honked she’d give him the finger. That was the kind of mood she was in.

  But no one honked.

  7

  Even though he’d taken a pill, Beam didn’t sleep well.

  His dreams were a jumble of images. Lani leaping without hesitation from a balcony high in the night, da Vinci smiling at him and holding out a badge, swastikas, pale stone buildings with columns, people lying dead with red letter Js on them, d
a Vinci again, still smiling, pointing at something on the sidewalk, something that had fallen.

  He awoke after a dream of waking and finding someone had taped red ribbons all over the room. Ribbons in bows, in loops, simple strands of ribbons.

  When he sat up and switched on the lamp, he almost expected to find them.

  But it was his bedroom as usual. Their bedroom. He remained sitting up in bed, wondering what dark specter of the mind had plucked his wife from the balcony. Witnesses had said she’d put down her drink at the charity function cocktail party she was attending, then walked calmly and resolutely out to the twenty-fourth-floor balcony. She’d been alone out there, and apparently she’d simply let herself fall over the railing into space. The railing had been higher than her waist, so it couldn’t have been an accident. Something like that, something so…monstrous and profound, what had moved her to do it?

  Beam had been sure things had changed between them, but was that true? Had it been more that things had finally come to a head? Had it been the death of their only child, so long ago? Had all the years of doubt and wondering that any cop’s wife endures finally taken its toll?

  The fact was, when people committed suicide without leaving notes, they left agonizing, unfinished business behind. Questions that would never be answered. Guilt that might never be firmly affixed. Their survivors had to learn to live with uncertainty, and get used to being haunted.

  Uncertainty was something that had always bothered Beam. Lani had known that about him, yet she’d chosen her anonymous and eternally mysterious death.

  Or might it have been an accident? Somehow…

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Light brighter than the lamp was beginning to show around the edges of the closed drapes. Glancing at the clock radio by the bed, he saw that it was quarter to five. Morning enough, he thought, swiveling on the mattress so he could stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, still lean and strong but with undeniably more fat collecting around his waist, musculature still there, but now that of a fifty-three-year-old man. There on his right thigh was the scar where the bullet had been removed, a pink-edged pucker about two inches in diameter. He ran a hand through his mussed gray hair and looked away from his image. Getting older fast.